Guest
Can I just say something? As a cis-woman, mostly hetero, of-colour, middle-class, in a theory-heavy MA program at a leftie university in Canada?
I'd just like to share my experience of how Zizek is being taken up among my peers. Especially young, white, heterosexual men on the "neu-neu-Left" or whatever we now call this loosely defined 'group' of "philosophizing" theory-heads ("theory boys" as they have been referred to elsewhere) who drag along Deleuze to coffeeshops, argue about Derrida in dingy bars filled with other disaffected looking (usually hipster) youth and generally spend all their time being... subversive or something. They often engage in similar "Zizekian" activities such as pop cultural analysis of film, making 'transgressive' (and misogynist) jokes, ironizing this, that and the other thing. All I can ask is whether, in a parallel concern to the one mounted by Chabert, we might consider Zizek's popularity to be worrying precisely because it is a symptom that certain discussions -- the struggles of feminists 'then and now', anti-racism activisim worldwide, the increasing isolation of the 'academe' from the 'real' (all scare-quotes, all the time, because I am making sweeping generalizations here) -- are becoming pooh-pooh issues for the NNL? I ask this because I see Zizek as a figure with whom so many of my (white, hetero, male) friends form the ultimate relation of transference: he is the person that absolves the new generation of guilty white straight men of their responsibility for political praxis while simultaneously guaranteeing them a set of performative idiosyncracies that assauge the insecurities of their masculine identifications. "He's an academic" -- so we excuse him the responsibility for what he says and what he does or does not do? "He's an academic and -so am I-" -- thus dissolving responsibility for the new masculinist irony that takes no political responsibilities for what is said and what is not done. I'm not saying that Zizek doesn't have interesting things to say. But perhaps there are two simultaneous conversations happening here: on the one hand there is the question of what it is that he writes (literally, Zizek's "content") and the function that he plays for the NNL (more allegorically, that which Zizek "does")... Two functions which are, of course, never hermetically sealed away from one another. Sorry for having only done a quick scan of the comments and entered by way of excerpting my comment from a longer-running conversation with a friend who feels similarly uncomfortable with the 'phenomenon' of Zizek.
Also: I identified myself positionally because let's not assume that people all "read" Zizek in the same way, and let's not assume he intends to have the same effects on all of us. If I find him, more often than not, some variation on violent-exclusionary-aggressive, it is because I cannot read him any other way given my history and my experiences. Surely we might consider the curious distribution of his popularity on the Left to be a question of interest
